She never said a word
Screen door slam is all I heard
I guess she’s pissed at me
Bought another Rush CD, and sporting a goatee…
She just won’t understand
The middle age of man
Bargain basement, used, and second hand
Empty roll my days
Darkness pours in waves
Gone, Geddy sings, I’m miles away
The priest is tired of me
Confessing sins on LSD
An empty river road
Running for the mother lode
I float adrift and free
Laugh in minor key
Bones bleached, tangled in debris
Hold this empty glass
This moment will pass
Gone, there it goes, gone at last…
My my my my Myspace blows
Most of my friends I don’t even know
My my my my Facebook sucks
Most of my friends just don’t give a…
I’ll just keep singing
Till sleep comes upon
This tired old son at last
You want to make the drive
Meet me at Hollywood and Vine
Selling postcards of the 405
Ts Corrigan
May 13, 2010
Friday, October 28, 2011
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
A Story in a Song - for piano if I ever get one again...
John, Let’s Roll
We were old, bar closed, the windless sky, the groan of December’s bones
She was bruised, young, strung out, confused, like fire to a fuse, ready for the Blues
We were cold, driving slow, a bloodshot roll, fool’s gold – we were old enough to know
Bored again, without a friend, but the enemy asks, a leather flask, we were born again
Pass around a flask just to pass the time – Winter’s wine
Harvest when it’s time, or it dies on the vine - Burns so fine
Up around the bend where the road never ends - Highway 9
John, let’s roll let’s roll, bless my soul
Her eyes wild, and when she smiled, we believed, she’s amused, our stories true
She was moved, by the pain in you, that vain dark muse, a ruse your wife saw through
Moonlight bled, color of lead, you, a clown, you laughed at anything that dirty blond said
You claimed to know, you paused to show, the gravity of revelation, a gift, your secret grove
The road curved, the Chevy swerved, and you observed, our gaze, in wonder, without a word
Pass around a flask just to pass the time – Winter’s wine
Harvest when it’s time, or it dies on the vine - Burns so fine
Up around the bend where the road never ends - Highway 9
John, let’s roll let’s roll, bless my soul
The Chevy sighed; you made a sign, for the girl, take hands with you, kindly guide
Sequoias rise, pierce the sky, of heaven, cathedral spires, blazing stars blind
Cold and clear, drawing near, a veiled fear, like a blade, when the trail disappeared
In your eyes, animal life, then I saw your hand, your hand, so white against the night
Pass around a flask just to pass the time – Winter’s wine
Harvest when it’s time, or it dies on the vine - Burns so fine
Up around the bend where the road never ends - Highway 9
John, let’s roll let’s roll, bless my soul
June 1, 2011
We were old, bar closed, the windless sky, the groan of December’s bones
She was bruised, young, strung out, confused, like fire to a fuse, ready for the Blues
We were cold, driving slow, a bloodshot roll, fool’s gold – we were old enough to know
Bored again, without a friend, but the enemy asks, a leather flask, we were born again
Pass around a flask just to pass the time – Winter’s wine
Harvest when it’s time, or it dies on the vine - Burns so fine
Up around the bend where the road never ends - Highway 9
John, let’s roll let’s roll, bless my soul
Her eyes wild, and when she smiled, we believed, she’s amused, our stories true
She was moved, by the pain in you, that vain dark muse, a ruse your wife saw through
Moonlight bled, color of lead, you, a clown, you laughed at anything that dirty blond said
You claimed to know, you paused to show, the gravity of revelation, a gift, your secret grove
The road curved, the Chevy swerved, and you observed, our gaze, in wonder, without a word
Pass around a flask just to pass the time – Winter’s wine
Harvest when it’s time, or it dies on the vine - Burns so fine
Up around the bend where the road never ends - Highway 9
John, let’s roll let’s roll, bless my soul
The Chevy sighed; you made a sign, for the girl, take hands with you, kindly guide
Sequoias rise, pierce the sky, of heaven, cathedral spires, blazing stars blind
Cold and clear, drawing near, a veiled fear, like a blade, when the trail disappeared
In your eyes, animal life, then I saw your hand, your hand, so white against the night
Pass around a flask just to pass the time – Winter’s wine
Harvest when it’s time, or it dies on the vine - Burns so fine
Up around the bend where the road never ends - Highway 9
John, let’s roll let’s roll, bless my soul
June 1, 2011
The Bells of St. Catherine
Inspired by a visit to a wooden church in the quaint fishing village of Honfleur, France.
Bells of Sainte-Catherine
There’s a siren song clanging in an old wooden room
Rings through the rafters and rattles the moon
Sing a few bars and the whaler lays down his harpoon
When the bells of Sainte-Catherine come tolling
The first mate is blinded by a rogue wave o’er the bow
Cries for the captain, wipes salt from his brow
The captain spies a loophole in an old wedding vow
When the bells of Sainte-Catherine come tolling
The schooner sinks wounded from the sea’s fatal blast
The captain screams a last prayer and clings to the mast
But our lady on the shoreline claims she’s been miscast
When the bells of Sainte-Catherine come tolling
Bridge:
I feel like I’m waiting for promising news
New Orleans singing the blues
I call on Sainte Catherine, sing a pretty old song
In my arms is where you belong
Up the cold beach crawls the captain with the first mate in tow
The siren song whispers where the northerlies blow
Black raven throws a shadow on the new fallen snow
When the bells of Sainte-Catherine come tolling
The captain casts a cold eye o’er the raven on the wing
He drops to his boxers and jumps in the ring
He’s footloose for a sea dog but he ain’t got that swing
When the bells of Sainte-Catherine come tolling
This old rocker carves up an American Pie
All the church bells hang broken, he doesn’t know why
Ask the dead boys on the levee drinking whiskey and rye
When the bells of Sainte-Catherine came tolling
Bridge
Well I never much cared for the dog-eat-dog life
Happy with a pretty book and a readable wife
But she traded my begging bowl for a stainless steel knife
Now I’m ringing the bells of Sainte-Catherine
t.s. corrigan August 5, 2005
Bells of Sainte-Catherine
There’s a siren song clanging in an old wooden room
Rings through the rafters and rattles the moon
Sing a few bars and the whaler lays down his harpoon
When the bells of Sainte-Catherine come tolling
The first mate is blinded by a rogue wave o’er the bow
Cries for the captain, wipes salt from his brow
The captain spies a loophole in an old wedding vow
When the bells of Sainte-Catherine come tolling
The schooner sinks wounded from the sea’s fatal blast
The captain screams a last prayer and clings to the mast
But our lady on the shoreline claims she’s been miscast
When the bells of Sainte-Catherine come tolling
Bridge:
I feel like I’m waiting for promising news
New Orleans singing the blues
I call on Sainte Catherine, sing a pretty old song
In my arms is where you belong
Up the cold beach crawls the captain with the first mate in tow
The siren song whispers where the northerlies blow
Black raven throws a shadow on the new fallen snow
When the bells of Sainte-Catherine come tolling
The captain casts a cold eye o’er the raven on the wing
He drops to his boxers and jumps in the ring
He’s footloose for a sea dog but he ain’t got that swing
When the bells of Sainte-Catherine come tolling
This old rocker carves up an American Pie
All the church bells hang broken, he doesn’t know why
Ask the dead boys on the levee drinking whiskey and rye
When the bells of Sainte-Catherine came tolling
Bridge
Well I never much cared for the dog-eat-dog life
Happy with a pretty book and a readable wife
But she traded my begging bowl for a stainless steel knife
Now I’m ringing the bells of Sainte-Catherine
t.s. corrigan August 5, 2005
Sunday, October 23, 2011
Fresh, Cleaned Up, Some Distance and Perspective
I wanted to retread my last Syria post, more palatable this time. I had a few emails from people thanking me for my honesty. Speaking and writing freely should be our banner, always and forever. To those championing free speech, I wanted to do them honor.
As for the rest... Perhaps the insulting and obscene comments can be kept at bay? Just read/reread with an open mind...
Homestretch. Last school year in Syria, the last months of living there. Come June we were gone. Our plan was to stay three years, although the usual contract is two years. But we knew we wanted to settle in a place, a region, for awhile, to live there. If we’d just sweated out a two-year stint, we’d just finish our first year, and then would have to start looking for employment elsewhere, with all the forms and finances and anxieties accompanying the move—plus, all of the baggage accumulated to ship. Our sea shipment took months to arrive; I can’t imagine wanting to pack that again so soon. Many folks will sign on for two years and vacate when the contract runs out. Quite a few of our friends, who came here a year after we did, disembarked, too, their two-year contract fulfilled. Turnover, it turns out, is high. Why? For one, Syria can be somewhat boring—or at least I got bored there. This might seem strange, considering the recent political upheavals: getting shot at for protesting isn’t boring. But as modes of expression are banned, and having been banned a few generations instills banned expression as a way of life, people naturally and even affably simply don’t express much. Why take a chance on making art when you could be pulled in for questioning? When authority is absolute and strictly from your leader, individual initiative is, of course, stifled. Perhaps there’s a distinctive mode of Western First World living long marrowed in our bones. After you’ve eaten at a few of the restaurants, most of which have exactly the same menus cooking nearly similar styles, you tire, and then either eat at home or eat with Western friends. Not that the cuisine wasn’t good—we’ve had some fantastic meals in Syria. We saw a smattering of music; we heard about an interesting dance group that blew through, but we neglected to catch that breeze. But for myself I’ve recognized what I deem a self-imposed barrier. What we’d intended before we arrived in Syria we never accomplished: learn the language as a gateway—the true gateway—into a new culture. A few furtive attempts at Arabic, and then we gave up. Enough to get by, that’s what we learned. And we did get by. But that’s all we did. So advertisements for a concert could very well have been sprayed across a billboard, but I’d drive by and think the woman pictured was hawking shampoo. I don’t quite know why we never kept up the Arabic lessons. Part of the reason is a very settled lifestyle I acquired, just keeping my own garden cultivated. Stepping lightly around trash day every day—there’s nothing encouraging in suggesting, as some have, that “after awhile you get used to it” as if deadening sense and myopic vision are survival tactics. I don’t want to survive, I want to live. When visiting a lovely beachcove last Spring near the mountain village of Kasab, a few of us actually spent our last morning walking the sand and picking up the trash the locals left. What is redeeming about all this? You will not find a friendlier, more welcoming people anywhere in the region. When charting up what we’ll miss about living here, it all comes down to friends: we’ve made some of the best friends of our lives here. But they’re almost all Westerners. To slough off the worn, threadbare jackets of our culture and suffer the tiny steps into an unfamiliar climate I find honorable. But in the end I find I’m too enamored of the good old West, liberal, environmentally uppity, animal-loving, creating and sustaining styles of music that defy categorizations, churning our theater and song and film and poetry and essay and food and story and dance and painting and sculpture, mundane, punk, heady, angry, desperate, savory, kickass, sultry, delicate, revelatory, whirling and wild, soft and silent, hymns and bells and whistling angels. Case in point: just now, dear reader, you might have noticed a pause in the narrative. Consider yourself astute. Indeed, I laid down the typing finger and walked into the night-lit front patio to investigate a noise like rain toppling and tinkling on the granite. Or whatever the pavement is. I knew what it was: one of our upstairs neighbors from one of the four floors was rinsing down their balcony railing with hosewater. Syria is dusty, incredibly so. Dust settles on all things living or inanimate. On balcony railings. So folks—or their housekeeper—hose the railings off. Of course, the dirty railing water splashed onto our patio, and so dirties it up more. Reader, I’ve trudged upstairs probably a dozen times over the last two years, complaining to seemingly understanding ears that their dirty railing should not be hosed off onto our perhaps clean patio. Dirty water sprinkling onto our cushioned lawnchairs. Go back, dear reader, and note how many times I brought this to their attention, including the owner of the building, a very nice rotund man you met early in this blog, who’d held my hand during the call to prayer one warm August evening and explained that Jew, Christian, Muslim, we all pray to the same God. First off, how many brain cells does it take to figure out that pouring dirty water onto someone else’s patio isn’t acceptable? Got a brain cell ballpark? Good, okay, then how often do you have to be told before you cease and desist, or perhaps—oh man, a wacky thought, this, hold on folks, we’re racing round the rickety end of the wooden rollercoaster soggy and peeling, two wheels off and flaring, no seatbelts—perhaps you can just get a rag warm water wet and wipe the railing down. I’m sorry, am I in line for a Nobel Prize for that brilliant idea? So I just walked out in righteous indignation, looked up in despair, thought I’d take the wet cushion up to the 4th floor, bang on the sweet guy’s door, and present him with his housekeeper’s damn failings. But I just shook my head. Why bother. Daily experience here is split between the lauded and the lame. A positive: a few weeks ago I was attempting to connect the natural gas tank for the stove. The nut wouldn’t screw, no matter what I tried. Frustrated, I went round the corner to the little shop and asked the proprietor how it works. Without a thought, he happily locked up his shop and accompanied me to our apartment, and connected our gas. A negative: the prevalence in this day and age of the 7th century symbol of oppression of women: the hijab. You just can't get used to it. The empowerment of women IS the one tried and true thing that lifts the economy of peoples. I defy every male on the planet to read Mary Wollstonecraft's "A Vindication for The Rights of Women" written in the 18th century and then try to argue rationally why women should be covered. A positive: the utmost hospitality that is hallmark of the region going back to nomadic times. We’ve experienced nothing but kindness and smiles in almost all of our dealings here. And as it never ceases to amaze me—as writ in these pages—if you don’t have money enough to pay for the dozen bottles of wine picked out, George (there are Georges selling wine and booze on either side of this one street in the Armenian quarter) hands you your bagged wine, scoffs at your apology, and says “Next time, next time!” and trusts you’ll pay then, which you do. And so, let’s end on a positive. All in all, we’re glad we made the journey, found friends, travelled, and lived in Syria. But I can’t live without Art. And a decent Jewish deli within a stone’s throw.
As for the rest... Perhaps the insulting and obscene comments can be kept at bay? Just read/reread with an open mind...
Homestretch. Last school year in Syria, the last months of living there. Come June we were gone. Our plan was to stay three years, although the usual contract is two years. But we knew we wanted to settle in a place, a region, for awhile, to live there. If we’d just sweated out a two-year stint, we’d just finish our first year, and then would have to start looking for employment elsewhere, with all the forms and finances and anxieties accompanying the move—plus, all of the baggage accumulated to ship. Our sea shipment took months to arrive; I can’t imagine wanting to pack that again so soon. Many folks will sign on for two years and vacate when the contract runs out. Quite a few of our friends, who came here a year after we did, disembarked, too, their two-year contract fulfilled. Turnover, it turns out, is high. Why? For one, Syria can be somewhat boring—or at least I got bored there. This might seem strange, considering the recent political upheavals: getting shot at for protesting isn’t boring. But as modes of expression are banned, and having been banned a few generations instills banned expression as a way of life, people naturally and even affably simply don’t express much. Why take a chance on making art when you could be pulled in for questioning? When authority is absolute and strictly from your leader, individual initiative is, of course, stifled. Perhaps there’s a distinctive mode of Western First World living long marrowed in our bones. After you’ve eaten at a few of the restaurants, most of which have exactly the same menus cooking nearly similar styles, you tire, and then either eat at home or eat with Western friends. Not that the cuisine wasn’t good—we’ve had some fantastic meals in Syria. We saw a smattering of music; we heard about an interesting dance group that blew through, but we neglected to catch that breeze. But for myself I’ve recognized what I deem a self-imposed barrier. What we’d intended before we arrived in Syria we never accomplished: learn the language as a gateway—the true gateway—into a new culture. A few furtive attempts at Arabic, and then we gave up. Enough to get by, that’s what we learned. And we did get by. But that’s all we did. So advertisements for a concert could very well have been sprayed across a billboard, but I’d drive by and think the woman pictured was hawking shampoo. I don’t quite know why we never kept up the Arabic lessons. Part of the reason is a very settled lifestyle I acquired, just keeping my own garden cultivated. Stepping lightly around trash day every day—there’s nothing encouraging in suggesting, as some have, that “after awhile you get used to it” as if deadening sense and myopic vision are survival tactics. I don’t want to survive, I want to live. When visiting a lovely beachcove last Spring near the mountain village of Kasab, a few of us actually spent our last morning walking the sand and picking up the trash the locals left. What is redeeming about all this? You will not find a friendlier, more welcoming people anywhere in the region. When charting up what we’ll miss about living here, it all comes down to friends: we’ve made some of the best friends of our lives here. But they’re almost all Westerners. To slough off the worn, threadbare jackets of our culture and suffer the tiny steps into an unfamiliar climate I find honorable. But in the end I find I’m too enamored of the good old West, liberal, environmentally uppity, animal-loving, creating and sustaining styles of music that defy categorizations, churning our theater and song and film and poetry and essay and food and story and dance and painting and sculpture, mundane, punk, heady, angry, desperate, savory, kickass, sultry, delicate, revelatory, whirling and wild, soft and silent, hymns and bells and whistling angels. Case in point: just now, dear reader, you might have noticed a pause in the narrative. Consider yourself astute. Indeed, I laid down the typing finger and walked into the night-lit front patio to investigate a noise like rain toppling and tinkling on the granite. Or whatever the pavement is. I knew what it was: one of our upstairs neighbors from one of the four floors was rinsing down their balcony railing with hosewater. Syria is dusty, incredibly so. Dust settles on all things living or inanimate. On balcony railings. So folks—or their housekeeper—hose the railings off. Of course, the dirty railing water splashed onto our patio, and so dirties it up more. Reader, I’ve trudged upstairs probably a dozen times over the last two years, complaining to seemingly understanding ears that their dirty railing should not be hosed off onto our perhaps clean patio. Dirty water sprinkling onto our cushioned lawnchairs. Go back, dear reader, and note how many times I brought this to their attention, including the owner of the building, a very nice rotund man you met early in this blog, who’d held my hand during the call to prayer one warm August evening and explained that Jew, Christian, Muslim, we all pray to the same God. First off, how many brain cells does it take to figure out that pouring dirty water onto someone else’s patio isn’t acceptable? Got a brain cell ballpark? Good, okay, then how often do you have to be told before you cease and desist, or perhaps—oh man, a wacky thought, this, hold on folks, we’re racing round the rickety end of the wooden rollercoaster soggy and peeling, two wheels off and flaring, no seatbelts—perhaps you can just get a rag warm water wet and wipe the railing down. I’m sorry, am I in line for a Nobel Prize for that brilliant idea? So I just walked out in righteous indignation, looked up in despair, thought I’d take the wet cushion up to the 4th floor, bang on the sweet guy’s door, and present him with his housekeeper’s damn failings. But I just shook my head. Why bother. Daily experience here is split between the lauded and the lame. A positive: a few weeks ago I was attempting to connect the natural gas tank for the stove. The nut wouldn’t screw, no matter what I tried. Frustrated, I went round the corner to the little shop and asked the proprietor how it works. Without a thought, he happily locked up his shop and accompanied me to our apartment, and connected our gas. A negative: the prevalence in this day and age of the 7th century symbol of oppression of women: the hijab. You just can't get used to it. The empowerment of women IS the one tried and true thing that lifts the economy of peoples. I defy every male on the planet to read Mary Wollstonecraft's "A Vindication for The Rights of Women" written in the 18th century and then try to argue rationally why women should be covered. A positive: the utmost hospitality that is hallmark of the region going back to nomadic times. We’ve experienced nothing but kindness and smiles in almost all of our dealings here. And as it never ceases to amaze me—as writ in these pages—if you don’t have money enough to pay for the dozen bottles of wine picked out, George (there are Georges selling wine and booze on either side of this one street in the Armenian quarter) hands you your bagged wine, scoffs at your apology, and says “Next time, next time!” and trusts you’ll pay then, which you do. And so, let’s end on a positive. All in all, we’re glad we made the journey, found friends, travelled, and lived in Syria. But I can’t live without Art. And a decent Jewish deli within a stone’s throw.
Monday, October 3, 2011
To See Beauty You Gotta Rise Above the Dust
We have to begin thinking of our time here as living in Honduras. If we trap our imaginations in the rough city we reside in, Tegucigalpa, we'll miss the startling beauty and memorable experiences to cherish here. A national holiday awarded us a three-day weekend, so Carrie and I determined to escape. I haven't blogged much about our short time here, as there's been little of note to note. Much like Aleppo, there's not much to do here. Unlike Aleppo, there's loads of street crime, and we are warned not to travel out at night, take cabs everywhere, stay out of certain neighborhoods. And here in Tegus, I think I can safely chart one of the most interesting cultural experiences of my life: one weekday afternoon we were in the backseat of a taxi stuck in traffic that clogs the narrow winding hilly streets here, chocking on exhaust, en route to Walmart. That was our highlight of the day. Hope we don't get robbed. To return: Carrie knew of some cabanas set high on a mountain bordering La Tigre National Park about 20 kilometers from Tegus. A short taxi ride from near the Mexican embassy in our neighborhood to one of the main roads where the chicken buses (old schoolbuses probably sold from the States) wait to groan and wheeze their way up to Valle de Angeles, a quaint colonial artisan handcraft village in the mountains. Another bus ride 15 kilometers to be dropped off at a road leading into the even smaller village of San Juancito, an old mining town once the economic powerhouse of Honduras, now nearly defunct and shrunk to a quarter of its size after the mining companies and a Pepsi bottling plant boarded windows and doors and skipped out. Once out of the dull grays and rickety browns of Tegus, lush green mountains and forests rise around the snaking roads, banana and coffee plantations, side of the road ramshackle stalls where peasant fires twirl white smoke into verdant countryside. Once dropped off, we called Jorge and Monica, the German owners of Cabana Mirador El Rosario, and a half hour later we were shaking hands with a tall thin Jorge who offers a large smile of teeth but is otherwise soft-spoken and quiet and content in the cloud forest he calls home. The rocky rumbling bouncing bumping ride in Jorge's pickup took indeed a half hour, up and up and up we go, the daily rains washing out scoops of earth from the road. Three big dogs greet us at the gate, and proceed to lead us down the winding stone steps past terraced gardens and fruit trees, and direct us to our cabana. For 13 years Jorge and his wife have operated the cabanas on two acres high on a sloping mountainside. Just two cabanas, clean, spartan, elegant wood. But the deal sealer is the view from our deck: forested mountains rolling down to a valley of sugar cane with a thick brown rushing river cutting gently through. Puffs of white cloud like daintily poised whipped cream toppings sift across the sky. Below us is their rich, diverse garden (no spraying), hummingbirds flit through the dense brush and the soft roar of the waterfall is heard around a distant canyon, otherwise the blessed silence and temperate winds of Honduras. What would you expect to pay for a weekend in Paradise? How about $35 a night? After a leisurely lunch of sandwiches, cut celery and apples, Carrie and I hiked the trails into La Tigre, vines trellising through mossy trees of grand and wild abandon, slivers of sunlight consecrating a curve in the trail, mist suddenly descending, and after days of heavy rain, arching waterfalls drew down the hillsides and splashed happily. For three hours hiking Carrie's and my soul were the only ones we encountered. About ten minutes from the cabana on our return hike, a torrential downpour soaked us, the road back down becomes a river, puddles formed in our hiking boots, my shirt creaked when I finally under our roofed deck removed my dripping clothes. The expanse of sky was white with foamy stormcloud and rain, and we were so high up that we could actually see the clawing fingers of a dark threatening raincloud spreading and convulsing toward us. A change of clothes, we head down another level to the main house. Jorge lights a fire to warm our cold feet. The dogs, furry and glad to see us dry, wander in and curl around our chairs. A cat waltzes by. Jorge opens the night's first bottle of a Chilean Cabernet. The last twilight blue shudders and then darkens in the panoramic sky outside wide windows settling on a peaceful world. Jorge quietly eases out of the room to prepare dinner. Carrie and I count our blessings, peer up at the high vaulted ceilings, we the cabana's only guests and now feeling like royalty in the main house, warmed by the now blazing fire, here on this lush mountainside in the quiet soft air of this forest in this Third World country, our feet up, the dogs' hair soft to our strokes, wine glasses full and held high, and we toast to the magic we've found, that glowing balm sweet and healing.
Thursday, September 29, 2011
How I Get By in the Third World...
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Turn to Gin
So this is what it’s come to
Life abroad in limbo,
My hairline and patience wearing thin
Soon it will be evening
Twilight, shade of grieving
No leaving, I turn to gin
I’ve got no one else to blame
Wanderlust fueled the flame
Scorching sun toughens my skin
Stranded, lost and shipwrecked
A Gilligan of the intellect
I reflect and turn to gin
Gin, I fear
Cold and clear
If you’ve a better idea
I’m all ears
City buildings wreathed in wire
Barbed and loaded guns for hire
Car alarms wail above the din
Gray exhaust perfumes the air
Bookstores are a sad affair
With consummate flair, I turn to gin
Exile and the bourgeoisie
Agony and the ecstasy
Fail to embrace the culture is a sin
But I’d consider turning gay
Just to see a Kushner play
Dismayed, I turn to gin
Easily bored and feeling weak
My lamentation’s not unique
Eschew the booze, bear the blues, and grin
I’m not cut out for martyrdom,
And after all’s said and done
She comes, my faithful gin
Gin, King Lear
Cold and clear
If you’ve a better idea
I’m all ears
Goddamn finally finished writing this,
Tegucigalpa, Honduras
September 26, 2011
Saturday, September 24, 2011
All I Wanted To Say About It
Song written after a good friend in Syria, a citizen there, refused to speak to me again because I kindly suggested that at least in the US you can protest without fear of violent repression. Well, honey, take this:
All I Really Wanted to Say About It
Wind whipped the wire while photographer got ready to shoot
Waiting for a sign when the desert spit the dust on his boot
He’ll soon be wiping blood off his heel, so I guess the point is moot
Hail the Day of Denial, Big Daddy’s got a new shiny suit.
Slogans of devotion in the mouths of everyone you meet
Flags are a-flying and the banners unfurled across the street
But the dragon’s blowing fire, so get out if you can’t stand the heat
Servants shuffle knives while the master shuffles his feet
Dear lady in a haze, confusing what is real and what is not
The guilty only find the words to speak when they fear getting caught
Will the sons and the daughters freely speak without fear of being shot?
I’m just tossing seeds to the weeds in an old vacant lot
Water in the cistern gleaming cold like a diamond pool
Water for the women of the wheat and the riders of the mule
But the rusted pipe’s corrupt and the king’s nobody’s fool
Flowers for the iron tower, the valley’s dry as a jewel
Packing up my bags, western sky’s calling my name
I thought I might apologize, but it wouldn’t be the same
Contrived explanations, empty wind when the dead are to blame
Here’s a shot of me in New York City, I’m the one just outside the frame.
Here’s a shot of me in New York City, I’m the one just outside the frame.
Written 5:30, April 23, 2011
All I Really Wanted to Say About It
Wind whipped the wire while photographer got ready to shoot
Waiting for a sign when the desert spit the dust on his boot
He’ll soon be wiping blood off his heel, so I guess the point is moot
Hail the Day of Denial, Big Daddy’s got a new shiny suit.
Slogans of devotion in the mouths of everyone you meet
Flags are a-flying and the banners unfurled across the street
But the dragon’s blowing fire, so get out if you can’t stand the heat
Servants shuffle knives while the master shuffles his feet
Dear lady in a haze, confusing what is real and what is not
The guilty only find the words to speak when they fear getting caught
Will the sons and the daughters freely speak without fear of being shot?
I’m just tossing seeds to the weeds in an old vacant lot
Water in the cistern gleaming cold like a diamond pool
Water for the women of the wheat and the riders of the mule
But the rusted pipe’s corrupt and the king’s nobody’s fool
Flowers for the iron tower, the valley’s dry as a jewel
Packing up my bags, western sky’s calling my name
I thought I might apologize, but it wouldn’t be the same
Contrived explanations, empty wind when the dead are to blame
Here’s a shot of me in New York City, I’m the one just outside the frame.
Here’s a shot of me in New York City, I’m the one just outside the frame.
Written 5:30, April 23, 2011
Instead of Living, Just Record It
In the future, nothing will be experienced, but only recorded. Documented on video for later viewing on smaller and smaller screens, your child in glorious pageantry dancing her sugar plum fairy across a pre-school stage will be a digital reproduction of an evening you won’t remember because you were there only to hold up your iPhone to capture a moment in her fleeting childhood. Why did you want to capture your daughter’s performance? Do you even know? Perhaps it was important to her, and therefore to you, because she had been practicing for weeks, telling you excitedly about her part, showing you her twirl, sharing anew the tale of the Nutcracker and the Rat. She wanted to know that you and Daddy would be there. You assured her you would, and, indeed, smiling to yourselves that evening on the drive over, proud parents, you both showed up (though your cell phones were on silent and you had no intention of not answering any vibration). When the lights dimmed and the magic began, tiny cameras held aloft (with all other parents), you videoed this evening’s performance because it was an important event—but evidently not important enough to pay attention to the performance itself while it was unfolding before your eyes. You missed it.
Or rather, you captured the performance, either partially or whole depending on your arm’s level of endurance holding up the device, so you could—well why, exactly? View it in the future in its greatly reduced capacity for reasons not strong enough then to sway you to experience it in the present?
Perhaps you wanted to forward it to me, because surely I get as much delight watching your daughter perform as you did recording it. Perhaps you wanted to upload it to Facebook, and monitor your wall awaiting the “likes” and effusive comments. We agree: she is just too cute. My, how she’s grown.
Perhaps years to come when she’s a snarling teenager averting her gaze and mumbling listless responses to your humblest morning greetings, you’ll sift through your saved files to watch in her more innocent and loving times what you didn’t watch the first time around. And under the clutter this is the driving reason, isn’t it: to remember. To scoop from its ceaseless flow a cupful of time’s rushing river. This is your daughter when she was young and beautiful and didn’t resent you. It was your daughter back then, too, when she was a sugar plum fairy, and that magical evening would never come again, though so many days and evenings were still to come, and many of these you recorded as well—blessed technology!—but the river kept rushing, didn’t it? Where did the time go? After receiving from your daughter a somewhat halfhearted goodbye hug—she fell limp too soon, you thought—and waving as the taxi took her to the airport for her flight to Prague to live with an indie filmmaker, who will end up not marrying her, you return to your digital recordings. There she is (no, there she was). You did it: you captured that wonderful evening long ago. She loved you so. Look at her smile. Don’t you wish you would have been there to see it?
Ask an ambitious mountaineer why he (or she) desires to ascend Mount Everest, the mountaineer may cleverly remember to answer “Because it’s there” and we nod and grin admiringly, sharing the aptness of this stock response. But that’s not the reason to ascend Everest, is it? You could brush aside the mountaineer’s unintended evasion and lay scrutiny: no really, why? Next response might come “Because I want to” or “Because I’ve always dreamed of doing it” which are variations on the original evasion. You persist. If at this point the mountaineer isn’t annoyed at your dogged pursuit, you may get a shrug. He may not know the reason. Or he may. But because the mountain exists isn’t a reason to climb it. The chair I’m sitting on right now also exists, but I doubt the mountaineer wants to climb it. Giraffes exist. After his descent from Everest, will he scale them?
If we can record it, we should record it. By recording it, we don’t have to bother experiencing it. Recording it is certainly much less work. We don’t have to attend to what we’re seeing or hearing, just whether we’re getting the footage we want and whether the device has enough power. We are relieved of the dreaded responsibility of living in the present, and more importantly, thinking about the meaning of the experience. Thank goodness. We can use our minds more constructively: putting the recorded footage on Facebook, for instance.
Look, your daughter has sugar-plummed her way offstage. You may stop recording now, and continue watching the delightful play. You have missed seeing your daughter, but she’ll return soon. Here she comes again: stop experiencing and start recording, quick. Well done: you have succeeded in missing another moment in your daughter’s life.
I had a friend who, when asked by strangers if he would be so kind to snap a photo of them standing in front of (insert attraction: waterfall, statue of stern king on horseback, sunset, whatever), would kindly refuse. I’m sure they didn’t expect that. What an asshole, they murmured as he walked away. Or perhaps they asked, why not? Being a kind person as I know him to be, he probably answered them truthfully. I know what he would have said. They may or may not have understood the gravity of his answer.
Make sure you take photos. You will often hear this as you bid goodbye to friends and family before embarking on any adventure or vacation. They want to see what you’ll see. You may meet some really fun people. Let’s say you do. You have such a great time with them, you make sure to document the four of you together to commemorate the amazing time you had. One of you approaches a stranger to ask him to take a photo of the four of you (careful whom you ask). Click. You’re all captured smiling gleefully. Back home, showing the photo to friends, you try to convince them how absolutely cool and amazing these people were. It should be apparent from the photograph. It’s not. But we all nod heartily and say “Wow, sounds like you had a great time” which isn’t entirely insincere.
I was in a bar once with a friend. We’d had a few drinks. A woman arrived with a hand-held video recorder and began filming the young woman behind the bar who busied herself wiping down the counters. I waited for the bartender to do something, or say something…well, significant, or out of the ordinary, or flatly just worth recording. She didn’t. Excuse me, I slurred to the video recorder, why are you filming her? Unwavering in her concentration, the woman replied, “Because she’s my friend.” I persisted, probably a little more impatiently than a few drinks before—okay, she’s your friend, but why are you filming her? “Because I want her to be famous,” her tone a bit annoyed I didn’t grasp the obvious. Well, of course I persisted again (I suppose I should have just asked if she knew any giraffes). As my friend pulled me off the bar stool toward daylight, the woman finally looked away from the device. “God, what’s wrong with you!”
Well, there isn’t just one thing wrong with me. But in this I’m simply trying to understand why people find it necessary to video-record the everyday. I walked along a North Carolina beach yesterday afternoon and passed a father with iPhone recording his two daughters splashing in frothy waves. They were too small and too young to evince any talent; they’d bend their squishy little legs and gather up water and let it drop, that’s pretty much it. When I returned direction twenty minutes later, young father was still their posed to record daughters repeating their fun. I suppose I shouldn’t be prejudicial: perhaps he wasn’t filming them, but watching porn.
The Venus de Milo, or Aphrodite of Melos, graces the Louvre in Paris, solemn, demurring her gaze, a sensual masterpiece of ideal Hellenistic beauty. Famous, it is mobbed by visitors because they’ve read or heard it’s famous, and here they are, a family, finally in Paris after a long and expensive flight from Ohio. They’ve read the guide, planned their few hours, and behold! In the marble flesh! They stand back and take a photo. This time they don’t have to ask: a stranger offers to take a photo of the whole family in front of it. Duly documented, it is forgotten, and the family searches out the next famous work of art in the guide. They’ve got photographic evidence that they indeed saw this famous statue. Thank goodness, because they can’t really afford numerous trips to Paris on what their salaries.
When they get home, they can prove to their friends.
Gather round the laptop. Look here. Click. Enlarge the jpeg. Ohhh, we say reverentially. You narrate: yes, that’s the famous Venus. Wow, we say, you really saw it. Click. Hey, that’s you guys next to the Victory of Something. That proves beyond doubt that you saw this famous statue! I guess you liked it so much you also bought a large cardboard glossy reproduction of it. Fifteen dollars? Whoever took that photo is a real professional. No, I know you’re not a professional photographer, you’re an accountant. So why did you take the photo when you also bought this expertly glossy reproduction? You just wanted to. I see. Rest assured, I don’t doubt you actually visited the museum and saw first-hand this famous statue; no reason to lie about a thing like that. Although here on your bookshelf is an art book you grabbed from the bargain rack at Barnes & Noble before your trip. Doesn’t look like it’s been opened. But here’s the photo of the Venus. Another real professional job. But hey, you now have your own photo of the famous statue. But tell me, the Venus is famous for its sensual expression of a Hellenistic ideal of beauty, so what did you notice about it specifically? Oh. But I thought you said you saw it, and this photo of you and the kids proves you were there. You just took the photo, is all. So you spent thousands of dollars and flew all the way to Paris and visited the Louvre which houses this famous statue which, let’s face it, you probably won’t visit again, and you were right there in the presence of this masterpiece of ancient sculpture, and you didn’t even look at the statue except to take the photo, the same photo you already own within this heavy art book you bought on the bargain rack at Barnes & Noble? The real work of art you simply ignored?
Well, at least you have your own picture.
Or rather, you captured the performance, either partially or whole depending on your arm’s level of endurance holding up the device, so you could—well why, exactly? View it in the future in its greatly reduced capacity for reasons not strong enough then to sway you to experience it in the present?
Perhaps you wanted to forward it to me, because surely I get as much delight watching your daughter perform as you did recording it. Perhaps you wanted to upload it to Facebook, and monitor your wall awaiting the “likes” and effusive comments. We agree: she is just too cute. My, how she’s grown.
Perhaps years to come when she’s a snarling teenager averting her gaze and mumbling listless responses to your humblest morning greetings, you’ll sift through your saved files to watch in her more innocent and loving times what you didn’t watch the first time around. And under the clutter this is the driving reason, isn’t it: to remember. To scoop from its ceaseless flow a cupful of time’s rushing river. This is your daughter when she was young and beautiful and didn’t resent you. It was your daughter back then, too, when she was a sugar plum fairy, and that magical evening would never come again, though so many days and evenings were still to come, and many of these you recorded as well—blessed technology!—but the river kept rushing, didn’t it? Where did the time go? After receiving from your daughter a somewhat halfhearted goodbye hug—she fell limp too soon, you thought—and waving as the taxi took her to the airport for her flight to Prague to live with an indie filmmaker, who will end up not marrying her, you return to your digital recordings. There she is (no, there she was). You did it: you captured that wonderful evening long ago. She loved you so. Look at her smile. Don’t you wish you would have been there to see it?
Ask an ambitious mountaineer why he (or she) desires to ascend Mount Everest, the mountaineer may cleverly remember to answer “Because it’s there” and we nod and grin admiringly, sharing the aptness of this stock response. But that’s not the reason to ascend Everest, is it? You could brush aside the mountaineer’s unintended evasion and lay scrutiny: no really, why? Next response might come “Because I want to” or “Because I’ve always dreamed of doing it” which are variations on the original evasion. You persist. If at this point the mountaineer isn’t annoyed at your dogged pursuit, you may get a shrug. He may not know the reason. Or he may. But because the mountain exists isn’t a reason to climb it. The chair I’m sitting on right now also exists, but I doubt the mountaineer wants to climb it. Giraffes exist. After his descent from Everest, will he scale them?
If we can record it, we should record it. By recording it, we don’t have to bother experiencing it. Recording it is certainly much less work. We don’t have to attend to what we’re seeing or hearing, just whether we’re getting the footage we want and whether the device has enough power. We are relieved of the dreaded responsibility of living in the present, and more importantly, thinking about the meaning of the experience. Thank goodness. We can use our minds more constructively: putting the recorded footage on Facebook, for instance.
Look, your daughter has sugar-plummed her way offstage. You may stop recording now, and continue watching the delightful play. You have missed seeing your daughter, but she’ll return soon. Here she comes again: stop experiencing and start recording, quick. Well done: you have succeeded in missing another moment in your daughter’s life.
I had a friend who, when asked by strangers if he would be so kind to snap a photo of them standing in front of (insert attraction: waterfall, statue of stern king on horseback, sunset, whatever), would kindly refuse. I’m sure they didn’t expect that. What an asshole, they murmured as he walked away. Or perhaps they asked, why not? Being a kind person as I know him to be, he probably answered them truthfully. I know what he would have said. They may or may not have understood the gravity of his answer.
Make sure you take photos. You will often hear this as you bid goodbye to friends and family before embarking on any adventure or vacation. They want to see what you’ll see. You may meet some really fun people. Let’s say you do. You have such a great time with them, you make sure to document the four of you together to commemorate the amazing time you had. One of you approaches a stranger to ask him to take a photo of the four of you (careful whom you ask). Click. You’re all captured smiling gleefully. Back home, showing the photo to friends, you try to convince them how absolutely cool and amazing these people were. It should be apparent from the photograph. It’s not. But we all nod heartily and say “Wow, sounds like you had a great time” which isn’t entirely insincere.
I was in a bar once with a friend. We’d had a few drinks. A woman arrived with a hand-held video recorder and began filming the young woman behind the bar who busied herself wiping down the counters. I waited for the bartender to do something, or say something…well, significant, or out of the ordinary, or flatly just worth recording. She didn’t. Excuse me, I slurred to the video recorder, why are you filming her? Unwavering in her concentration, the woman replied, “Because she’s my friend.” I persisted, probably a little more impatiently than a few drinks before—okay, she’s your friend, but why are you filming her? “Because I want her to be famous,” her tone a bit annoyed I didn’t grasp the obvious. Well, of course I persisted again (I suppose I should have just asked if she knew any giraffes). As my friend pulled me off the bar stool toward daylight, the woman finally looked away from the device. “God, what’s wrong with you!”
Well, there isn’t just one thing wrong with me. But in this I’m simply trying to understand why people find it necessary to video-record the everyday. I walked along a North Carolina beach yesterday afternoon and passed a father with iPhone recording his two daughters splashing in frothy waves. They were too small and too young to evince any talent; they’d bend their squishy little legs and gather up water and let it drop, that’s pretty much it. When I returned direction twenty minutes later, young father was still their posed to record daughters repeating their fun. I suppose I shouldn’t be prejudicial: perhaps he wasn’t filming them, but watching porn.
The Venus de Milo, or Aphrodite of Melos, graces the Louvre in Paris, solemn, demurring her gaze, a sensual masterpiece of ideal Hellenistic beauty. Famous, it is mobbed by visitors because they’ve read or heard it’s famous, and here they are, a family, finally in Paris after a long and expensive flight from Ohio. They’ve read the guide, planned their few hours, and behold! In the marble flesh! They stand back and take a photo. This time they don’t have to ask: a stranger offers to take a photo of the whole family in front of it. Duly documented, it is forgotten, and the family searches out the next famous work of art in the guide. They’ve got photographic evidence that they indeed saw this famous statue. Thank goodness, because they can’t really afford numerous trips to Paris on what their salaries.
When they get home, they can prove to their friends.
Gather round the laptop. Look here. Click. Enlarge the jpeg. Ohhh, we say reverentially. You narrate: yes, that’s the famous Venus. Wow, we say, you really saw it. Click. Hey, that’s you guys next to the Victory of Something. That proves beyond doubt that you saw this famous statue! I guess you liked it so much you also bought a large cardboard glossy reproduction of it. Fifteen dollars? Whoever took that photo is a real professional. No, I know you’re not a professional photographer, you’re an accountant. So why did you take the photo when you also bought this expertly glossy reproduction? You just wanted to. I see. Rest assured, I don’t doubt you actually visited the museum and saw first-hand this famous statue; no reason to lie about a thing like that. Although here on your bookshelf is an art book you grabbed from the bargain rack at Barnes & Noble before your trip. Doesn’t look like it’s been opened. But here’s the photo of the Venus. Another real professional job. But hey, you now have your own photo of the famous statue. But tell me, the Venus is famous for its sensual expression of a Hellenistic ideal of beauty, so what did you notice about it specifically? Oh. But I thought you said you saw it, and this photo of you and the kids proves you were there. You just took the photo, is all. So you spent thousands of dollars and flew all the way to Paris and visited the Louvre which houses this famous statue which, let’s face it, you probably won’t visit again, and you were right there in the presence of this masterpiece of ancient sculpture, and you didn’t even look at the statue except to take the photo, the same photo you already own within this heavy art book you bought on the bargain rack at Barnes & Noble? The real work of art you simply ignored?
Well, at least you have your own picture.
Friday, September 9, 2011
Deep Springs, Silent Peaks
Just a glimpse of a documentary on Nietzsche, and I am swept into a whirlwind of regret, dust and pebbles clogging eyes and nostrils, those organs I once used to see mist feathered peaks and breathe crisp alpine granite rain-softened cool still hidden waters. What have I not been engaged in? Passing photo stills in the documentary of a German scholar coveting his oak and icy windows and warm pages of books, and I find myself reaching, longingly, into the computer screen. Nietzsche's last human gesture before falling into the abyss of madness was to throw his arms around a workhorse who had fallen under his terrible burden. I witness those horses in Syria. Would anyone weep for them, fallen? Oh Nietzsche, you last decent man. You embraced the animal while descending as a god--and what god doesn't retire finally into madness? When have I last admired the silent soar, watchful and fiercely intent, of an eagle? I cannot continue to give away if fresh flows are not coming in. I must trace a path to new springs.
Wednesday, August 17, 2011
My, my
Such a storm of offending and offensive comments unleashed after my Thrill Gone post (no names offered of course--ah the boldness in anonymity). As a courtesy, I deleted it--and the comments. But the post? Just a whimsical and lively relating of a smattering of my experiences there. But what many obviously missed was: being my blog, these were MY experiences. Not anyone else's. And of course I don't speak for anyone else. Unless the offended would be content if I just kept to the party line? Or pretend my experiences didn't exist? That's probably better: denial. Sorry to disappoint. When I think of my time in Syria now, I can only conjure up good memories. But to my detractors: I think you have other worries far more significant than a blogger posting. Far, far more significant.
Saturday, July 9, 2011
Rocking at the Guggenheim
Art unfamiliar to us we often dismiss, not so much out of ignorance but because it confounds the limits of what we’ve come to understand as defining Art. And what defines Art for us is the sum of our previous experiences with Art, beginning with straightforward realist representational landscapes because they often look “just like” the world as we’ve seen it straightforwardly whizzing by the car window. We also approach Art as passive consumers, not active critical questioners, unless we’re in a classroom being asked to work for an understanding—meaning a grade. Perhaps we’ve been lucky enough to engage in the Art History class, and learned something beyond uncomplicated landscape painting. Our limits of what define Art expand, then, but only so far.
We often come to Art at a museum holding “famous” works of Art with the same affable expectations we have for other tourist attractions or the beach: please delight me. The beach is easiest, for our participation takes the least thinking. We don’t have to do anything but go to sleep in the sun. Tourist attractions—statues, buildings, waterfalls—expect a little more attention paid, but we can still drift through taking snapshots, then check the places off your list of Things to See (why we have to see them is never asked). Art overlaps with tourist attractions, in that contained in a particular museum are famous works by artists whose names we know, so we pay money to see them so we can say we saw them. This approach requires the least effort: come to the work, take a minute or less discerning what it is, read the title and artist, nod in recognition. That works up through the Impressionists, maybe a Picasso when his figures were recognizable. Woe to anyone stumbling through the thicket of 20th century postwar contemporary Art. When representation fell away—or was hacked, shoved, or dreamed away—so did the attention span of the average museum tourist. Free audio guides have helped, surely, but when we hear curators airily suggesting that the artist is “questioning the traditional line between life and art” or “commenting on the meaning of movement and space in our post-industrial age” we tend to reel, letting the conceptual language whirl around like confetti, then move on to the next crazy installment involving melting ice and video of the artist consuming string.
The end of representation marked the end of the Old World, and that world was all we knew. Modern Art in the 20th century began questioning everything—the role of the artist, the tools used, the placement of the artistic work, the space it inhabits, the medium through which it communicates, whether it needs to communicate anything at all, whether it can communicate anything, the historical, social, political, psychological, and economic forces involved in the work and the creative process and where the work ends up, the role of the observer, the space between the observer and the work observed, whether that “space” is meaningful in any way, and if so, who decides? I could go on. In the same way we can’t know how a bridge is built by just looking at it, to appreciate Art we need to put the effort in: what is the artist trying to do, or say? What is s/he reacting against, breaking away from, reviving, honoring? What is the socio-political and/or historical context we can place the work, and does that have any bearing on our understanding? What has come before, what came after? Methods, colors, figures, space, light, shadow, movement, brushstroke. The first step in approaching Art is simply to shift the emphasis of this question: “How is this Art?” to “How is this Art?” and trusting not that what we are beholding in this side alley gallery a “great” work of Art, but simply an expression of the artist. Yes, all Art is quite useless, as Oscar Wilde famously quipped.
At the Guggenheim, an exhibition of the works from the 1960s to the present of South Korean born Lee Ufan snailed upwards in Gehry’s building, called "Marking Infinity". From the Guggenheim's website: charting his creation of a visual, conceptual, and theoretical terrain that has radically expanded the possibilities for painting and sculpture since the 1960s. Lee is acclaimed for an innovative body of work that revolves around the notion of encounter—seeing the bare existence of what is actually before us and focusing on "the world as it is."
Ufan’s works were initially unfamiliar to me; moreover, as instillations using common, working-industrial materials simply arranged in space didn’t appear as having the artist’s creative intentions upon them. One instillation from 1968 had stainless steel thin narrow strips strewn across one another but interwoven to make a soft grid like a magnified section of a wicker chair. Eleven strips by ten make up the threading design. Just beyond each side of this square weave on the floor lay piles of more stainless steel strips, unadorned, still, as though awaiting their chance to join the weaving. The piece seems both unfinished and fresh, inviting the viewer weaving. In this, Ufan achieves an “encounter” between work and audience looking upon the work. The stainless steel strips are manufactured for their sharp, strong, pliable, industrial usefulness. Here they give way to be threaded into a softer, woven texture that in itself could be useful, as woven textures like wicker chairs are. The Art is the invitation between unfinished design and the strips alongside awaiting their participation—as we stand alongside acknowledging the invitation to “finish” the work began. Relatum, which names many of the works in his exhibit, is a philosophical term denoting things or events between which a relation exists. So artwork is not “an” object as such but a network of relationships, shifting aesthetic experience to the art of encounter. Rather than objects representing and so standing apart, Art for Ufan is a process of mediation between self – other, nature – industry, being – nothing, presence – infinity.
Relatum – a Response from 2008 is a “pure distillation of materials,” an oval stone two feet high by two wide leaning toward at a distance of a few feet a large thick dark square slab of steel: an encounter of organic nature and processed industry. The two remain at a distance, but incline to one another, which is the invitation by the artist through his Art to contemplate their relationship, Their distance in space, framed as it is in contemplative proximity, symbolizes distance in time and in shared natures. Organic stone becomes over time (and place) processed or created into steel. Looking on from our distance as viewer, the oval stone appears ordinary, even dull beige in color; indeed it shares in its dull sheen the color of the steel slab, the latter only darker and richer in power. The steel slab lies in its finished but unused industrial state—yet it also is unfinished as it awaits industrial use: what good is a flat slab of steel? If we turn to the stone, we see its potential for the arts of sculpture, and to the artist’s eye it awaits its representational form. But slicing through our initial judgment, examining the stone qua stone, we can more readily appreciate the time compressed it contains, its mysterious ancient composite structure. What powers forged this heavy weighted thing? Beige soon gives way to intricate patterns and sparkling facets, pores and stains and moss dried to a burned green paste. An earth hovers there in space, minerals and spices packed within like planets and stars within a galaxy. If Art is intentional, Ufan arranged the rising angled oval stone to face toward the flat steel slab lying before it, but its slender end coming to meet the stone bends upward gently like a wave heralding the stony prow of a ship. One side of steel slab facing the stone is gouged slightly along its edge, trimmed half an inch in precise shaping to the presence and force of the stone, as though by inundation over time and proximity the stone has worn away the edge. This encounter, a gradual wearing away of the seemingly solid and timeless and enduring steel, is ironic in that the stone’s own minerals were worn and broken down and transferred across time and distance to form the steel slab itself.
Dialogue Series – Dialogue 2008: A large canvas is laid down flat. The artist bends over a pristine creamy white canvas, then makes a limited number of discreet strokes with a broad flat brush loaded with gray paint, a color vague and ephemeral. Gestures are minimal, his mind focused, and the resulting image is sort of a solid gray flat cup-shape, basically square but tapering slightly at the bottom. Through the process, the shape depicted is at once minimal and perfectly executed, yet because the image is not centered on the canvas; all the more does its painted shape call to its own presence. Although gray, there is a darkening on one side of the shape, grayness expressing its own depth and hollowness. The image is simple and precisely conveyed, as though the artist executed with absolute concentration a lithe gesture this moment in time and presence in space.
Relatum – Silence, 2008: a tall steel structure rises from the floor yet leans for support on the wall behind it. Steel, flat rectangle twelve feet high. Away from it stands a rock two feet high, found and placed there from nature, yet seeming at its head to incline toward the height of its blank, industrial formed distant brother. The wall holds the steel’s shadow, dark and solid at its host but only a nightly wisp of material in itself. The light, however, upon the rock casts a number of soft, inter- and overlapping shadows of its own. Shadows both cast by the light and the soft intermingling, as though ripples easing toward the steel. The steel’s industrial use intends its geometric, stable, forceful rectangle shape, yet removed from its industrial context, lending instead its presence to this aesthetic, “useless” encounter with its organic original self—again, the rock quarried to give the steel slab its mineral body and blood, indeed its very existence.
Funny story: the artist, who was then shuttling between Japan and France, was doing an exhibition in Paris. For some installments, he went searching for a particular kind of rocks he had in mind. Walked the city parks, and couldn’t find any. He became discouraged, then came upon piles of just these needed rocks. He used a wheelbarrow to haul rocks to the exhibition space. That afternoon he discovered outside the police, who wanted to speak to him. He needed to return the rocks immediately, as they were part of a Japanese garden. Ufan pleaded, and, as they were French, the police agreed that he could return them after the show. Ironic that he found in Paris the rocks he needed, in a garden whose cultural design he was ignorant of, but so close to his home.
We often come to Art at a museum holding “famous” works of Art with the same affable expectations we have for other tourist attractions or the beach: please delight me. The beach is easiest, for our participation takes the least thinking. We don’t have to do anything but go to sleep in the sun. Tourist attractions—statues, buildings, waterfalls—expect a little more attention paid, but we can still drift through taking snapshots, then check the places off your list of Things to See (why we have to see them is never asked). Art overlaps with tourist attractions, in that contained in a particular museum are famous works by artists whose names we know, so we pay money to see them so we can say we saw them. This approach requires the least effort: come to the work, take a minute or less discerning what it is, read the title and artist, nod in recognition. That works up through the Impressionists, maybe a Picasso when his figures were recognizable. Woe to anyone stumbling through the thicket of 20th century postwar contemporary Art. When representation fell away—or was hacked, shoved, or dreamed away—so did the attention span of the average museum tourist. Free audio guides have helped, surely, but when we hear curators airily suggesting that the artist is “questioning the traditional line between life and art” or “commenting on the meaning of movement and space in our post-industrial age” we tend to reel, letting the conceptual language whirl around like confetti, then move on to the next crazy installment involving melting ice and video of the artist consuming string.
The end of representation marked the end of the Old World, and that world was all we knew. Modern Art in the 20th century began questioning everything—the role of the artist, the tools used, the placement of the artistic work, the space it inhabits, the medium through which it communicates, whether it needs to communicate anything at all, whether it can communicate anything, the historical, social, political, psychological, and economic forces involved in the work and the creative process and where the work ends up, the role of the observer, the space between the observer and the work observed, whether that “space” is meaningful in any way, and if so, who decides? I could go on. In the same way we can’t know how a bridge is built by just looking at it, to appreciate Art we need to put the effort in: what is the artist trying to do, or say? What is s/he reacting against, breaking away from, reviving, honoring? What is the socio-political and/or historical context we can place the work, and does that have any bearing on our understanding? What has come before, what came after? Methods, colors, figures, space, light, shadow, movement, brushstroke. The first step in approaching Art is simply to shift the emphasis of this question: “How is this Art?” to “How is this Art?” and trusting not that what we are beholding in this side alley gallery a “great” work of Art, but simply an expression of the artist. Yes, all Art is quite useless, as Oscar Wilde famously quipped.
At the Guggenheim, an exhibition of the works from the 1960s to the present of South Korean born Lee Ufan snailed upwards in Gehry’s building, called "Marking Infinity". From the Guggenheim's website: charting his creation of a visual, conceptual, and theoretical terrain that has radically expanded the possibilities for painting and sculpture since the 1960s. Lee is acclaimed for an innovative body of work that revolves around the notion of encounter—seeing the bare existence of what is actually before us and focusing on "the world as it is."
Ufan’s works were initially unfamiliar to me; moreover, as instillations using common, working-industrial materials simply arranged in space didn’t appear as having the artist’s creative intentions upon them. One instillation from 1968 had stainless steel thin narrow strips strewn across one another but interwoven to make a soft grid like a magnified section of a wicker chair. Eleven strips by ten make up the threading design. Just beyond each side of this square weave on the floor lay piles of more stainless steel strips, unadorned, still, as though awaiting their chance to join the weaving. The piece seems both unfinished and fresh, inviting the viewer weaving. In this, Ufan achieves an “encounter” between work and audience looking upon the work. The stainless steel strips are manufactured for their sharp, strong, pliable, industrial usefulness. Here they give way to be threaded into a softer, woven texture that in itself could be useful, as woven textures like wicker chairs are. The Art is the invitation between unfinished design and the strips alongside awaiting their participation—as we stand alongside acknowledging the invitation to “finish” the work began. Relatum, which names many of the works in his exhibit, is a philosophical term denoting things or events between which a relation exists. So artwork is not “an” object as such but a network of relationships, shifting aesthetic experience to the art of encounter. Rather than objects representing and so standing apart, Art for Ufan is a process of mediation between self – other, nature – industry, being – nothing, presence – infinity.
Relatum – a Response from 2008 is a “pure distillation of materials,” an oval stone two feet high by two wide leaning toward at a distance of a few feet a large thick dark square slab of steel: an encounter of organic nature and processed industry. The two remain at a distance, but incline to one another, which is the invitation by the artist through his Art to contemplate their relationship, Their distance in space, framed as it is in contemplative proximity, symbolizes distance in time and in shared natures. Organic stone becomes over time (and place) processed or created into steel. Looking on from our distance as viewer, the oval stone appears ordinary, even dull beige in color; indeed it shares in its dull sheen the color of the steel slab, the latter only darker and richer in power. The steel slab lies in its finished but unused industrial state—yet it also is unfinished as it awaits industrial use: what good is a flat slab of steel? If we turn to the stone, we see its potential for the arts of sculpture, and to the artist’s eye it awaits its representational form. But slicing through our initial judgment, examining the stone qua stone, we can more readily appreciate the time compressed it contains, its mysterious ancient composite structure. What powers forged this heavy weighted thing? Beige soon gives way to intricate patterns and sparkling facets, pores and stains and moss dried to a burned green paste. An earth hovers there in space, minerals and spices packed within like planets and stars within a galaxy. If Art is intentional, Ufan arranged the rising angled oval stone to face toward the flat steel slab lying before it, but its slender end coming to meet the stone bends upward gently like a wave heralding the stony prow of a ship. One side of steel slab facing the stone is gouged slightly along its edge, trimmed half an inch in precise shaping to the presence and force of the stone, as though by inundation over time and proximity the stone has worn away the edge. This encounter, a gradual wearing away of the seemingly solid and timeless and enduring steel, is ironic in that the stone’s own minerals were worn and broken down and transferred across time and distance to form the steel slab itself.
Dialogue Series – Dialogue 2008: A large canvas is laid down flat. The artist bends over a pristine creamy white canvas, then makes a limited number of discreet strokes with a broad flat brush loaded with gray paint, a color vague and ephemeral. Gestures are minimal, his mind focused, and the resulting image is sort of a solid gray flat cup-shape, basically square but tapering slightly at the bottom. Through the process, the shape depicted is at once minimal and perfectly executed, yet because the image is not centered on the canvas; all the more does its painted shape call to its own presence. Although gray, there is a darkening on one side of the shape, grayness expressing its own depth and hollowness. The image is simple and precisely conveyed, as though the artist executed with absolute concentration a lithe gesture this moment in time and presence in space.
Relatum – Silence, 2008: a tall steel structure rises from the floor yet leans for support on the wall behind it. Steel, flat rectangle twelve feet high. Away from it stands a rock two feet high, found and placed there from nature, yet seeming at its head to incline toward the height of its blank, industrial formed distant brother. The wall holds the steel’s shadow, dark and solid at its host but only a nightly wisp of material in itself. The light, however, upon the rock casts a number of soft, inter- and overlapping shadows of its own. Shadows both cast by the light and the soft intermingling, as though ripples easing toward the steel. The steel’s industrial use intends its geometric, stable, forceful rectangle shape, yet removed from its industrial context, lending instead its presence to this aesthetic, “useless” encounter with its organic original self—again, the rock quarried to give the steel slab its mineral body and blood, indeed its very existence.
Funny story: the artist, who was then shuttling between Japan and France, was doing an exhibition in Paris. For some installments, he went searching for a particular kind of rocks he had in mind. Walked the city parks, and couldn’t find any. He became discouraged, then came upon piles of just these needed rocks. He used a wheelbarrow to haul rocks to the exhibition space. That afternoon he discovered outside the police, who wanted to speak to him. He needed to return the rocks immediately, as they were part of a Japanese garden. Ufan pleaded, and, as they were French, the police agreed that he could return them after the show. Ironic that he found in Paris the rocks he needed, in a garden whose cultural design he was ignorant of, but so close to his home.
Saturday, June 18, 2011
Drifting Back to the Ocean
As far back as I can remember, and long into my early 20s, my family and I would spend three weeks of summer in Newport Beach, about an hour below Los Angeles, with my grandparents who lived right on the ocean. Since the early 1950s my grandparents had lived there; we have a photograph, unbelievable in its sparseness, taken from a Cessna of the Pacific coastline supporting only a few scattered houses, modestly built, a small road behind, iceplant-studded sand dunes rolling to a narrow railroad track, and an empty Pacific Coast highway in the background. My father would rouse us at three in the morning, we’d pack and pile into the Buick, and drive the eight hours from Sacramento down old highway 99 to arrive as my grandmother was clearing the lunch dishes. Newport Beach is one of the wealthiest enclaves in Southern California, but I didn’t know it then, too young to practice the arts of envy and disdain used to fashion my ego in college; indeed, the affluence that lined the beachfront and spread thinner and thinner further inland seemed sun-bleached and ephemeral, suburban and charmless. The ocean was real because it whispered and shouted and roared and pulsed and heaved and drenched the briny wind, hurled towering waves that cracked and curled and charged frothy and white like galaxies. And there were bikinis with tanned young women inside. I know now why I can’t leave the ocean, why I return to its razor horizon in imagination and dream and whenever I can get the time. The ocean drew me in like the vast reaches of the universe, silent, infinite, containing all the heavens and me—and I still wonder how and why. And the long summer days and nights beside her established finally that I was not and would never be one of the cool teens, and there was no getting around that.
Early memories on the seashore were of creation and discovery. Refortifying moist, ever melting sandcastle bulwarks against charging waves, finally watching with a mix of amusement and disappointment as a fierce swell overleaps and floods our poor residences, shanties mostly, to refortify again, a task hopeless and endless and therefore ready for renewal. Or we dug tremendous moats around as a first defense. But the seriousness of play was in the building, the creative act. Discovery became both motive and end. Worlds in tidepools, delicate and perfect communities replenished moment to moment with tidal splash; the froosh and hiss and hump of waves heaving under the black rock jetty; the racket and crowds of gulls surrounding my attempts to feed them dry bread.
Alternatively, we’d just dig holes, scooping out handful after soft, wet handful, piling up landfill, digging seemingly for the sake of the hole itself (Zen without the awareness). At the water’s edge we’d dig up meager sandcrabs that squirmed, scurried and burrowed in our palms, wriggled free with the dripping sand to reburrow until another generation wandered to the wave’s retreat. We buried each other in the sand, feeling soft warmth and pressure. These symbolic associations with the grave, digging holes, burial, I’m sure are coincidental, yet unsettling nevertheless.
Reflecting on why we are here—standing at the ocean’s edge as a metaphor for anchored down on a planet hurling through cold black space—occupied my thoughts only later in life, probably when I began having a somewhat regularly fulfilled sex life. Prior to that, I fumbled from one infatuation to another, hoping to be if not loved, then noticed. Handsome enough I suppose I was, as early photographs of my father in uniform offer favorable precedent, and photographs of my mother in her 20s show her to be quite beautiful, so the chemistry was there. I remember my father introducing his two very young sons to a Catholic priest at a local parish in Anaheim. The priest, Midwestern-seeming and balding, shook our hands heartily and bellowed, “Well, what two handsome young men!” He said it for my father’s approval, but I considered this a generous compliment. Coming from a priest, I reasoned, there must be some truth to it. But if pretty girls were not lavishing attention on me as they certainly did in my fantasies, endorsements from priests were worthless. Being conventionally handsome simply meant you don’t stand out in a crowd as a disfigured freak. It also means plain.
Southern California’s beaches have a well-deserved rarefied air of the shapely and beautiful. The supple, tanned skin of teenage girls, warmed from a day in the sun, glowed, radiated a honeyed aura as they lounged and laughed on their towels. They were my first experience with the ethereal nature of beauty, what rises from the world, passes through the world, yet remains indefinable. How to approach them, talk to them, for godsakes make friends with them (forget anything even remotely sexual; you may as well have asked me to fathom Space-Time), was daunting and mysterious. Yet for all that of course I was deliriously attracted to them. Advice from all sides would be as reasonable and empty as a truism: “You just go up to them and say hello,” as though the power of the priest’s conviction and my unexceptional but respectable enough ancestry should puff my chest and sparkle my delivery. Reader, you know what I’m talking about. I only honed my humble talent and acquired the wisdom when I couldn’t use and didn’t need them anymore. The way it goes, I guess.
I was content enough, at times, simply to look at these sunning maidens. But who actually met them, chatted them up, even (so I imagined) touched them? The surfers. Southern California surfers at that. Behold them, sitting on their boards, rising and falling with the swells, flashes of sunlight flickering on the water around them like paparazzi, waiting patiently as gods with their eyes resting on the shimmering horizon for the coming set. You couldn’t get up early enough to catch the ocean without them (I tried once). You lost sight of them as night finally flooded the waves, leaving only the muffled sound of heavy crashing. They were serious in their passion, but reserved. They spoke little, and not very often. They drifted in and drifted out like the tides they monitored. They were self-contained, necessary and sufficient, and that was their victory. I used to love to bodysurf and boogieboard—still do—but when I joined a pack of surfers they always regarded my presence with cordial yet guarded territorial suspicion, as noblemen must when an affable peasant strolls through the palace courtyard. Besides their inevitable bronze color they had the physique which these sunny maidens admired: shoulders and chests pumped with years of powering their boards under, in, over, and through waves, and a tanned physique, not the reptilian sheen of bodybuilders. Once more, their brawn didn’t look as if they worked at building muscle (more to their credit, you see, modest saints). They didn’t know what combs are used for, and their hair was always perfect. Reader, have you ever seen an unattractive surfer? Neither have I.
We couldn’t afford surfboards, and it wasn’t worth buying one just to use a few weeks in summer. I was also a little afraid of learning, faced with the failure that accompanies new endeavors. So I bodysurfed. Then my parents purchased boogieboards and swimfins for my brother and me, and my great love for the ocean began in earnest. In the ocean, within its cold, mineral, dark emerald fold, I felt borne up by forces greater than myself. Swimming, I was allowed buoyant play. I was also given moments of aesthetic joy: floating nearly alone in blue twilight waiting for waves, the orange sunset skimming the water to my right, moonlight whitening the water to my left; floating nearly alone during a light gray rain, the ocean turning jade green and soft as glass. In the ocean I encountered the wild. From my grandparent’s balcony one New Year’s morning I spied to the south a pod of porpoise trawling just beyond the wave break. I hustled on my wetsuit, grabbed my fins, and charged into the water. I swam hard, looking up to catch their distance, dug in and swam, then paused way out to find eight or ten large shiny dark gray beautiful porpoise gliding by on either side of me. As they rose and glided, their black eyes regarded me, and I trembled.
But after the night closed the swimming and tanning, there wasn’t much else to do after dinner, which was early and then lengthened with bottles of wine and conversation, which we wanted no part of. So my brother and I would launch our skateboards, rolling down the cement strand fronting beachhouse rentals crunched side by side all the way to the Balboa Pier a few miles south. Destination was the Balboa arcade, where hundreds of sun drenched youths gathered and wandered, see and were seen, flirt or fail, and hoof the long skate home. Those Newport summer nights at the arcade was the ever-recurring home to connect, and we’d remain ever vigilant to maintain cool as bevy after bevy of California girls drifted by (it occurs to me that my brother, three years younger, always did pretty well with women, and perhaps he may have had better success then without me tagging along, but whatever). I remember a few summers going where every single dude wore Izod shirts sporting the little green alligator. You swear you looked the coolest with yours, unique. One night we skateboarded down the promenade, met up with three other skaters, befriended a few more, more joined, until we reached the pier, a sunburned horde skidding to a stop. One of the guys, probably the oldest, took stock. “Okay,” he said, looking down the row of us sitting on a cement wall rounding the parking lot, “let’s see, we have to get pussy for one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen guys. I mean sixteen,” pointing to himself. We all forged on, our number whittling down as night dragged on. We scattered. Walked up and down and around. Attempted at eye contact with the lovelies. But Southern California girls just sailed by like nymphs, or sirens who, far from drawing you to the rocks, pay you no attention at all.
At one point my brother and I veered away, heading home, then paused, entertained by a water balloon fight. Up on a rental’s second floor balcony were three teenage girls still in bikinis. Besides a few balloons, they’d employed a hose to jet water over the strand and onto the sand, and plastic buckets. Down below on the beach were four guys, three well built and good-looking, shirtless, and one who was a little pudgy around the waist, but probably came in handy because he had a car and could drive the others around. The boys dashed between rentals to refill balloons to the size of small pigs. The girls whipped the hose around to fire in every direction. Civilian passersby would either duck and rush through, or give wide berth outside of the hose’s range. I noticed the pudgy kid duck with a full balloon behind a large trash can at the edge of the cement, peering around for his chance. But suddenly the strategy changed: evidently one of the boys found a door unlocked, and all three rushed up the stairs and ambushed the girls, pelting them on the balcony as they screamed. One of the boys grabbed the hose, cut the supply, and their battle was won. Gallant in victory, the boys found towels to wipe down the maidens, who accepted graciously. I don’t know if the boys knew the girls before, but they were in, and the night was still young. As they all stood on the balcony, the forgotten pudgy fourth one, outside and unpaired, emerged, hiding his filled balloon behind his back. This was his moment. Attention was on him. He wanted the game. But as he took another step, the others high on the balcony in unison waved him off, shouted discouragements—the game was, after all, finished—and at that point I saw him gently but firmly begin squeezing his balloon, tighter and tighter, until it burst and soaked into his shorts. The others didn’t know it, though. So with the attention riveted on him, he made a faltering show of throwing the flabby balloon. The balcony gasped, but the torn piece just floated, then dropped. The others immediately turned to drying off and getting along. The pudgy one remained alone, for he wasn’t invited up. Casting for sympathy, he turned to my brother and me, witnesses. But we turned away and rode off into the night, tired ankles angling us home to sleep with the soft ocean crowarsh and the wind feathering the salt-rusted window screen.
Early memories on the seashore were of creation and discovery. Refortifying moist, ever melting sandcastle bulwarks against charging waves, finally watching with a mix of amusement and disappointment as a fierce swell overleaps and floods our poor residences, shanties mostly, to refortify again, a task hopeless and endless and therefore ready for renewal. Or we dug tremendous moats around as a first defense. But the seriousness of play was in the building, the creative act. Discovery became both motive and end. Worlds in tidepools, delicate and perfect communities replenished moment to moment with tidal splash; the froosh and hiss and hump of waves heaving under the black rock jetty; the racket and crowds of gulls surrounding my attempts to feed them dry bread.
Alternatively, we’d just dig holes, scooping out handful after soft, wet handful, piling up landfill, digging seemingly for the sake of the hole itself (Zen without the awareness). At the water’s edge we’d dig up meager sandcrabs that squirmed, scurried and burrowed in our palms, wriggled free with the dripping sand to reburrow until another generation wandered to the wave’s retreat. We buried each other in the sand, feeling soft warmth and pressure. These symbolic associations with the grave, digging holes, burial, I’m sure are coincidental, yet unsettling nevertheless.
Reflecting on why we are here—standing at the ocean’s edge as a metaphor for anchored down on a planet hurling through cold black space—occupied my thoughts only later in life, probably when I began having a somewhat regularly fulfilled sex life. Prior to that, I fumbled from one infatuation to another, hoping to be if not loved, then noticed. Handsome enough I suppose I was, as early photographs of my father in uniform offer favorable precedent, and photographs of my mother in her 20s show her to be quite beautiful, so the chemistry was there. I remember my father introducing his two very young sons to a Catholic priest at a local parish in Anaheim. The priest, Midwestern-seeming and balding, shook our hands heartily and bellowed, “Well, what two handsome young men!” He said it for my father’s approval, but I considered this a generous compliment. Coming from a priest, I reasoned, there must be some truth to it. But if pretty girls were not lavishing attention on me as they certainly did in my fantasies, endorsements from priests were worthless. Being conventionally handsome simply meant you don’t stand out in a crowd as a disfigured freak. It also means plain.
Southern California’s beaches have a well-deserved rarefied air of the shapely and beautiful. The supple, tanned skin of teenage girls, warmed from a day in the sun, glowed, radiated a honeyed aura as they lounged and laughed on their towels. They were my first experience with the ethereal nature of beauty, what rises from the world, passes through the world, yet remains indefinable. How to approach them, talk to them, for godsakes make friends with them (forget anything even remotely sexual; you may as well have asked me to fathom Space-Time), was daunting and mysterious. Yet for all that of course I was deliriously attracted to them. Advice from all sides would be as reasonable and empty as a truism: “You just go up to them and say hello,” as though the power of the priest’s conviction and my unexceptional but respectable enough ancestry should puff my chest and sparkle my delivery. Reader, you know what I’m talking about. I only honed my humble talent and acquired the wisdom when I couldn’t use and didn’t need them anymore. The way it goes, I guess.
I was content enough, at times, simply to look at these sunning maidens. But who actually met them, chatted them up, even (so I imagined) touched them? The surfers. Southern California surfers at that. Behold them, sitting on their boards, rising and falling with the swells, flashes of sunlight flickering on the water around them like paparazzi, waiting patiently as gods with their eyes resting on the shimmering horizon for the coming set. You couldn’t get up early enough to catch the ocean without them (I tried once). You lost sight of them as night finally flooded the waves, leaving only the muffled sound of heavy crashing. They were serious in their passion, but reserved. They spoke little, and not very often. They drifted in and drifted out like the tides they monitored. They were self-contained, necessary and sufficient, and that was their victory. I used to love to bodysurf and boogieboard—still do—but when I joined a pack of surfers they always regarded my presence with cordial yet guarded territorial suspicion, as noblemen must when an affable peasant strolls through the palace courtyard. Besides their inevitable bronze color they had the physique which these sunny maidens admired: shoulders and chests pumped with years of powering their boards under, in, over, and through waves, and a tanned physique, not the reptilian sheen of bodybuilders. Once more, their brawn didn’t look as if they worked at building muscle (more to their credit, you see, modest saints). They didn’t know what combs are used for, and their hair was always perfect. Reader, have you ever seen an unattractive surfer? Neither have I.
We couldn’t afford surfboards, and it wasn’t worth buying one just to use a few weeks in summer. I was also a little afraid of learning, faced with the failure that accompanies new endeavors. So I bodysurfed. Then my parents purchased boogieboards and swimfins for my brother and me, and my great love for the ocean began in earnest. In the ocean, within its cold, mineral, dark emerald fold, I felt borne up by forces greater than myself. Swimming, I was allowed buoyant play. I was also given moments of aesthetic joy: floating nearly alone in blue twilight waiting for waves, the orange sunset skimming the water to my right, moonlight whitening the water to my left; floating nearly alone during a light gray rain, the ocean turning jade green and soft as glass. In the ocean I encountered the wild. From my grandparent’s balcony one New Year’s morning I spied to the south a pod of porpoise trawling just beyond the wave break. I hustled on my wetsuit, grabbed my fins, and charged into the water. I swam hard, looking up to catch their distance, dug in and swam, then paused way out to find eight or ten large shiny dark gray beautiful porpoise gliding by on either side of me. As they rose and glided, their black eyes regarded me, and I trembled.
But after the night closed the swimming and tanning, there wasn’t much else to do after dinner, which was early and then lengthened with bottles of wine and conversation, which we wanted no part of. So my brother and I would launch our skateboards, rolling down the cement strand fronting beachhouse rentals crunched side by side all the way to the Balboa Pier a few miles south. Destination was the Balboa arcade, where hundreds of sun drenched youths gathered and wandered, see and were seen, flirt or fail, and hoof the long skate home. Those Newport summer nights at the arcade was the ever-recurring home to connect, and we’d remain ever vigilant to maintain cool as bevy after bevy of California girls drifted by (it occurs to me that my brother, three years younger, always did pretty well with women, and perhaps he may have had better success then without me tagging along, but whatever). I remember a few summers going where every single dude wore Izod shirts sporting the little green alligator. You swear you looked the coolest with yours, unique. One night we skateboarded down the promenade, met up with three other skaters, befriended a few more, more joined, until we reached the pier, a sunburned horde skidding to a stop. One of the guys, probably the oldest, took stock. “Okay,” he said, looking down the row of us sitting on a cement wall rounding the parking lot, “let’s see, we have to get pussy for one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen guys. I mean sixteen,” pointing to himself. We all forged on, our number whittling down as night dragged on. We scattered. Walked up and down and around. Attempted at eye contact with the lovelies. But Southern California girls just sailed by like nymphs, or sirens who, far from drawing you to the rocks, pay you no attention at all.
At one point my brother and I veered away, heading home, then paused, entertained by a water balloon fight. Up on a rental’s second floor balcony were three teenage girls still in bikinis. Besides a few balloons, they’d employed a hose to jet water over the strand and onto the sand, and plastic buckets. Down below on the beach were four guys, three well built and good-looking, shirtless, and one who was a little pudgy around the waist, but probably came in handy because he had a car and could drive the others around. The boys dashed between rentals to refill balloons to the size of small pigs. The girls whipped the hose around to fire in every direction. Civilian passersby would either duck and rush through, or give wide berth outside of the hose’s range. I noticed the pudgy kid duck with a full balloon behind a large trash can at the edge of the cement, peering around for his chance. But suddenly the strategy changed: evidently one of the boys found a door unlocked, and all three rushed up the stairs and ambushed the girls, pelting them on the balcony as they screamed. One of the boys grabbed the hose, cut the supply, and their battle was won. Gallant in victory, the boys found towels to wipe down the maidens, who accepted graciously. I don’t know if the boys knew the girls before, but they were in, and the night was still young. As they all stood on the balcony, the forgotten pudgy fourth one, outside and unpaired, emerged, hiding his filled balloon behind his back. This was his moment. Attention was on him. He wanted the game. But as he took another step, the others high on the balcony in unison waved him off, shouted discouragements—the game was, after all, finished—and at that point I saw him gently but firmly begin squeezing his balloon, tighter and tighter, until it burst and soaked into his shorts. The others didn’t know it, though. So with the attention riveted on him, he made a faltering show of throwing the flabby balloon. The balcony gasped, but the torn piece just floated, then dropped. The others immediately turned to drying off and getting along. The pudgy one remained alone, for he wasn’t invited up. Casting for sympathy, he turned to my brother and me, witnesses. But we turned away and rode off into the night, tired ankles angling us home to sleep with the soft ocean crowarsh and the wind feathering the salt-rusted window screen.
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